Amazon Australia set for a 'soft' launch this Thursday at 2pm

Amazon'sAustralian arrival is already tipped to massively shake-up retail in Australia. In the email, it stated that the company "start an internal testing phase with a small number of customers on Thursday 23 November".

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is just hours away from an official launch in a new key market. How long the closed test phase will last for we don't know - One might take the regular "updates via email" to mean a launch is imminent and to expect regular nearly hourly emails for a Black Friday launch or one could equally guess that the emails will be spread over a number of days and there won't be a launch this week.

Mills added that the company received an email from Amazon asking them to be ready to receive orders from Thursday.

Amazon is set to launch its services in Australia this week, with the local site scheduled to arrive in time for the Black Friday sales. A number of items have popped up on the Australian site in recent weeks.

Amazon does exist in Australia, but the products are limited to e-books and Kindles.

Last week Amazon Australia's country manager Rocco Braeuniger told those attending the Marketplace Seller Summit in Sydney that the retailer was "really, really, really close" to launching. Amazon earlier promised that they would be offering "hundreds of thousands of products", but whether these will be individual product types or the total available stock across all categories is still not clear. Australian consumers are particularly price savvy when it comes to electronic goods, and will often compare prices across multiple retailers to find the best value. The products will be listed by third-party retailers who will be able to sell their product in exchange for a commission.

'Amazon is definitely going to make a dent with the novelty and the buzz factor in the lead-up to Christmas, ' Mr Kilmartin said.

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